A Good Hut is Hard to Find

Pound for pound, the women of Ethiopia's service industry must be one of the most attractive cross-sections of the world's population; my waitress at the confoundedly-named Extreme Hotel was no exception. She had served me a number of national dishes--from spicy Doro Wat to the ground beef staple Kitfo--with finesse and a ready smile. By the fifth night, I felt up to a little small talk and told her that my work as a waiter had financed my trip.

"What was your salary?" she asked.
"Pardon me?" The boundary between r's and l's in English is less-pronounced in Amharic. She repeated the question, and I pondered it.
"Well," I rambled, "on a good night, I probably make $150. On a bad night, I might break $100. So I probably make an average of $120 a night."
She laughed. "I make a 150 birr a month."
"A month?" I stared at her slack-jawed.
"Yes, one month, 150 birr." She smiled and left me to my food.

Back in my 172 birr a night hotel room, I began calculating. At 8.7 birr a dollar (roughly the current exchange rate), she made about $18 a month. Working five nights a week, she could hope to make $216 a year, some $36 dollars more than the newly announced per capita GDP. So, on a really good night--not altogether unusual at Restaurant Magnus--I made more than she did in an entire year. As if to heighten the absurd inequity, she wore a cleaner uniform and carried herself with more dignity than I ever did.

I began pacing and wound up in the bathroom. As the 150 birr a month figure mixed with the day's images of Addis Abeba's poor, I felt an unendurable wave of sorrow. What could I do? The rusty waterworks began churning. I sat down with a ponderous plop on the cover of the toilet and, as my backside burst through it and into the commode's reservoir, I realized that simply feeling sorry for Ethiopia was about as effective as plunging my butt into a bird bath. I also realized, incidentally, why Ethiopians keep their toilet seats up.

Luckily for me, I had met a man by the name of Hassan Nasser a couple of days before. A well-known trader, he inspired me over a round lattes with his rag-to-relative riches story of growing up as a shoeshine boy and using his wits to become an antiquities dealer. He was a scintillating conversationalist loaded with personal histories of Ethiopia, the sort of things I devour. Whenever he recounted miscarriages of justice or, come to think of it, any form of iniquity ever perpetuated by man in the history of the world, a dull blue flame of outrage flickered in his eyes--the mark of a righteous individual. We soon became inseparable and were referred to half-disparagingly as 'The Macchiato Brothers' by the sundry loiterers of Addis--a reference to the components of the de riguer coffee drink, one-half black espresso and one-half white milk.

After telling me how he lost his incisors fleeing forced conscription by the Marxist Derg regime, he mentioned his wife and family across town in Hannah Maryam. I inquired further, and he invited me to see for myself. A kindly man from Canada by the name of Shawn had helped him acquire a plot of land and build a home, some outbuildings, and a hut. He invited me to stay in the latter. It was just the sort of offer I had been waiting for: I could stay with an Ethiopian family outside the diesel-choked commotion of Addis and learn the rhythms of daily life. No more hysterical taxi horns at the gates of the Extreme Hotel inciting the stray dogs into nights of epochal warfare! Here was a way to use my money for the local good instead of putting it in the pocket of a morally decrepit miser of a man who paid his waitresses $18 a month.

We decided on Saturday the 23rd as the move-in day and Meki met me in the morning. We took a series of minibuses, first from the Piazza to Saris, then from Saris to the Ring Road and Hannah Maryam. Built by a joint Sino-Ethiopian workforce (or, if you listen to any Ethiopian, by the labor of their countrymen under cruel overlordship of Chinese taskmasters), the Ring Road isn't exactly a ring yet. The last I heard, it circumnavigated three-fourths of Addis Abeba with the final quarter in some state of abeyance. But that's neither here nor there. What I want to write about are the minibuses.

The minibuses of Addis Abeba form a far-reaching and cheap system of public transport. They are invariably of Toyota-make, the top half white, the bottom half blue. They can hold up to eighteen people, though the limits of comfort hover closer to twelve. These snub-nosed vehicles are perfect for the difficult maneuvers demanded of them: weaving from traffic lane to road's edge for pickup, darting around pedestrians curiously indifferent to their lives. Their dashboards are bedecked with votive images of Christianity, with Mary being the apparent patron of the minibus drivers. On the whole, these guys (always guys) seem less under the spell of a death wish than the taxi drivers who perform the most kamikaze feats of derring-do in the name of shaving 30 seconds of the transit time, only to return to sitting around aimlessly. A spoonful of adrenaline makes the medicine go down.

The best place to sit in a minibus is the front. The panoramic advantages of such seats are somewhat diminished by their certain-death-upon-impact and driver-fondling-your-leg thinking-its-the-gearshift qualities. The worst place to sit is probably on top of the wheel bed due to a hot torrent of dust. Two people operate a single minibus, the driver and the tout. The driver is usually the elder of the two, although it must be said that he might be twelve. The tout, for his part, has to be a born acrobat. At every opportunity he slides open the cargo door and hangs precariously out of the van shouting its destination: Saris! Saris! Piassa! Piassa! Mercato! Mercato! When he perceives an interested party, he slaps the side of the van signaling the driver to stop. Sometimes, inexplicably, the tout gets out and disappears for five or ten minutes until the driver begins leaving in storm of calumny; he then miraculously reappears bounding through the door. The minibus: an uneasy marriage of transportation and entertainment.

In this way, Meki and I arrived in Hannah Maryam's bucolic surrounds. I met his wife, Habiba, and his daughters, Hannan and Labiha; I also took a liking to the halcyon hut where I have been living for the last week and a half, hence my lack of posting.

Stay tuned...